The Poetry of W.B. Yeats

A century and a half since his birth, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats is one of the best-loved in the English language, known for his lyric poems such as ‘The Lake Isle of Innishfree’ or for romantic poems like ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.’ Throughout his literary career, though, Yeats wrote in a range of styles and on diverse subjects. His poems reflect his Irish nationalism, reinvent traditional genres, draw inspiration from Irish myth and legend, and push into innovative symbolism. Stephen Regan and Michael O’Neill take us on a journey through the varied landscape of Yeats’s verse. [MP3 version]

The poems are ordered as follows. Stephen Regan is the first reader you’ll hear.

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